Sunday, December 6, 2015

By the hoary hosts of hoggoth: minis!

Yes, I read the new Dr Strange comic recently and I probably won't pick up issue 2. It's okay, I guess and that's the problem really. Okay art, okay ideas, okay writing and okay, I was not gripped. Chris Bachalo went from an artist I really enjoyed to an artist I remember really enjoying. Not my cuppa.

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I started this over Thanksgiving. It was a bit of a messy process, I'd tried something new, following a tutorial by Shoshanna Bauer on her facebook page that used colour theory to create a more realistic skin-tone. It was going swimmingly until I ballsed it up a trifle with a poorly timed red-wash. I was able to recover, though I had to abandon the initial plan.

***

FA19 Citadel Adventurer, sculpted my Michael Perry.

When I was 8 or so I would run my fingers over advertisements in White Dwarf magazine, usually a single gritty black and white photo or some line drawings of a miniature with line upon line of codes and names underneath. I'd wonder what the miniatures looked like and make strange little plans of which ones sounded like they'd be great to have. These older White Dwarfs have been marked up with ticks and underlines of the minis that grabbed my interest.

I don't know if this was one I underlined, but she is certainly one of the ones from those advertisements. A certain visceral memory is summoned up when I paint a miniature like this. There is almost nostalgia, but it is tempered totally by the reality of the piece of lead in my hand. This is not a thing past, not a thing that belongs there. It is as alive now as when it was first cast 30 odd years ago,

"Join an adventuring party, " Lissandra muttered, "visit distant dungeons, meet interesting creatures, and kill them..." Somehow, a trapdoor and four battles ago the joke had become truth and Lissandra wished she had taken up bookbinding like father wanted.